Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

The document did not aim to be amenable to social reality, nor polite toward political power, which it considered not merely supported by the clans but actually shaped by similar goals. Don Peppino didn’t want to believe the clan was an evil choice a person makes, but rather the result of clear conditions, fixed mechanisms, identifiable and gangrenous causes. No church or individual in this region had ever been so determined to clarify things.

  The southern Italian’s wariness and distrust of the establishment because of its age-old inability to solve the serious problems that afflict the south, particularly employment, housing, health, and education;

  The suspicion, not always baseless, of complicity with the Camorra on the part of politicians who, in exchange for electoral support, or to achieve common goals, guarantee cover and grant favors;

  The widespread feeling of personal insecurity and constant risk resulting from insufficient legal protection of persons and possessions, from the slowness of the legal system, the ambiguity of the legislative tools … that not infrequently leads to an appeal for defense organized by the clans or the acceptance of Camorra protection;

  The lack of clarity on the job market, so that finding a job is more a matter of Camorra-client operations than the pursuit of a right based on employment legislation;

  The absence or inadequacy, even in pastoral activities, of a true social education, as if it were possible to shape a mature Christian without also shaping the man and the mature citizen.

  In the late 1980s Don Peppino organized an anti-Camorra march following a mass assault on the carabinieri barracks in San Cipriano d’Aversa. Some carabinieri had dared to break up a fight between two local boys during an evening of entertainment in honor of the patron saint, so dozens of people decided to destroy their headquarters and beat up the officers. The San Cipriano barracks are tucked in a narrow alley, and the marshals and lance corporals had no means of escape. The bosses themselves had to send the neighborhood capos to put down the revolt and save the carabinieri. Antonio Bardellino was still in control at that time, and his brother Ernesto was the mayor.

  We, the priests of the churches of Campania, do not intend, however, to limit ourselves to denouncing these situations; rather, within the scope of our abilities and possibilities, we intend to help overcome them even by revising and integrating the matter and method of pastoral activity.

  Don Peppino started to question the bosses’ religious beliefs, to deny explicitly that there could be any harmony between the Christian creed and the business, political, and military power of the clans. In the land of the Camorra, the Christian message is not considered contradictory to Camorra activities: if the clan acts for the good of all its affiliates, the organization is seen as respecting and pursuing the Christian good. The killing of enemies and traitors is seen as a necessary, legitimate transgression; by the bosses’ reasoning, the command “Thou shalt not kill” inscribed on Moses’ tablets may be suspended if the homicide occurs for a higher motive, namely the safeguarding of the clan, the interests of its managers, or the good of the group, and therefore of everyone. Killing is a sin that Christ will understand and forgive in the name of necessity.

  At San Cipriano d’Aversa, Antonio Bardellino made use of an old ritual that eventually disappeared: pungitura, which the Cosa Nostra also used in initiating new affiliates. The aspirant’s right index finger would be pricked with a pin and the blood made to drip onto an image of the Madonna of Pompeii. This was then burned over a candle and passed, hand to hand, to all the clan managers who stood around a table. If all the affiliates kissed the Madonna, the candidate became officially part of the clan. Religion is a constant point of reference for the Camorra, not merely a propitiatory gesture or cultural relic but a spiritual force that determines the most intimate decisions. Camorra families, especially the most charismatic bosses, often consider their own actions as a Calvary, their own conscience bearing the pain and weight of sin for the well-being of the group and the men they rule.

  At Pignataro Maggiore the Lubrano clan paid to have a fresco of the Madonna restored. It is called the Madonna of the Camorra since the town’s most important Cosa Nostra fugitives from Sicily turned to her for protection. It’s not really that difficult to imagine Totò Riina, Michele Greco, Luciano Liggio, and Bernardo Provenzano kneeling in front of the fresco and praying that their actions be enlightened and their getaways protected.

  When Vincenzo Lubrano was acquitted, he organized a pilgrimage—several busloads of the faithful—to San Giovanni Rotondo to give thanks to Padre Pio, who, he believed, was responsible for his absolution. Life-size statues of Padre Pio and terra-cotta or bronze copies of the open-armed Christ on Pão de Açúcar in Rio de Janeiro can be found in the villa of many a Camorra boss. In the drug-warehouse laboratories in Scampia, bricks of hashish are often cut thirty-three at a time—like Christ’s age. Then they halt work for thirty-three minutes, make the sign of the cross, and start up again. A way to propitiate Christ and receive earnings and tranquillity. The same happens with packets of cocaine; often before they are distributed to the pushers, the neighborhood capo blesses them with holy water from Lourdes in the hopes that they don’t kill anyone, especially because he would have to answer personally for the poor quality of the stuff.

  Camorra power does not involve only the flesh, nor does it merely own everyone’s life. It also lays claim to souls. Don Peppino wanted to bring some clarity to words, meanings, and values.

  The Camorra gives the name family to a clan organized for criminal purposes, in which absolute loyalty is the law, any expression of autonomy is denied, and not only defection but the conversion to honesty is considered a betrayal worthy of death; the Camorra uses every means to extend and consolidate this type of family, even exploitation of the sacraments. For the Christian, shaped to the school of the Word of God, family means only a group of people united by shared love, in which love means disinterested and attentive service, in which service exalts him who offers it and him who receives it. The Camorra claims to have its own religiosity, and at times it manages to deceive not only the faithful, but also the inexperienced or ingenuous shepherd of souls.

  The document even attempted to broach the subject of the sacraments. To keep at bay any possible confusion of Communion, marriage, and the role of the godfather, with Camorra strategies. To distance clan pacts and alliances from religious symbols. At the mere thought of saying such things the local priests would have run to the bathroom in fright with their hands on their stomachs. Who would chase away from the altar a boss eager to baptize an affiliate’s child? Who would refuse to celebrate a marriage just because it was the result of an alliance between Camorra families? Don Peppino was clear:

  In the sacraments that call for a godfather, do not allow that role to be held by anyone not known for Christian maturity and honesty in his public and private life. Do not admit to the sacraments anyone who attempts to assert undue pressure in the absence of the necessary sacramental initiation.

  Don Peppino’s challenge to the power of the Camorra came in the moment when Francesco Sandokan Schiavone was hiding in a bunker under his villa in town, the Casalesi families were warring among themselves, and cement and waste were becoming the new frontiers of their empires. Don Peppino did not want to play the consoling priest who accompanies murdered boy soldiers to their grave and whispers, “You must be strong,” to mothers in black. In an interview he stated, “We must divide the people so as to throw them into crisis.” He also took a stand politically, explaining that his priority was to fight political power as an expression of criminal business power: he would give his support to concrete projects, to renovation, and he would not remain impartial. “Political parties have become confused with their representatives; often the candidates favored by the Camorra have neither policy nor party, but merely a role as player or a post to fill.” The goal was not to defeat the Camorra. As Don Peppino himself would say, “Winners and losers are all in the same boat.” Instead it was to understand, t
ransform, bear witness, speak out, take an electrocardiogram of the heart of economic power to understand how to wrest the organ’s muscles from the clan’s control.

  I have never for one instant felt pious, yet Don Peppino’s words resounded with something beyond the religious. He created a new method that reestablished religious and political speech. A faith in being able to bite into reality and not let go until you rip it to pieces. A language capable of tracing the scent of money.

  We tend to think that money doesn’t smell, but that’s true only when it is in the emperor’s hands. Before it ends up between his fingers, pecunia olet—money does indeed smell. Like a latrine. Don Peppino toiled in a land where money carries a scent, but only for a moment—the instant in which it is extracted, before it becomes something else, before it can become legitimate. Odors we recognize only when our noses brush against what smells. Don Peppino Diana realized that he had to keep his face close to the ground, on people’s backs and eyes, that he couldn’t pull away if he wanted to keep seeing and pointing the finger, if he wanted to understand where and how business wealth accumulates, and how the killings and arrests, the feuds and silences, begin. He had to keep his instrument—the word—the only tool that could alter the reality of his time, on the tip of his tongue. And this word, incapable of keeping silent, was his death sentence. His killers did not pick a date by chance. March 19, 1994, was the feast of San Giuseppe, his name day. Early morning. Don Peppino was in the church meeting room near his study. He had not yet donned his priestly robes, so it was not immediately clear who he was.

  “Who is Don Peppino?”

  “I am.”

  His final answer. Shots echoed in the nave. Two bullets hit him in the face, others pierced his head, neck, and hand, and one hit the bunch of keys on his belt. They had shot from close range, aiming at his head. A shell lodged between his jacket and his sweater. Don Peppino was getting ready to say the first mass of the day. He was thirty-six years old.

  Renato Natale, Casal di Principe’s Communist mayor, was one of the first to race to the church, where he found the priest’s body still on the floor. Natale had been elected only four months earlier. It was no coincidence; they wanted to make that body fall during his very, very brief political tenure. He was the first Casal di Principe mayor to make fighting the clans a top priority. He had even resigned from the town council in protest because he felt it had been reduced to merely rubber-stamping decisions that were made elsewhere. The carabinieri once raided the house of Gaetano Corvino, a town councilman, finding all the top clan managers assembled while Corvino was at a council meeting at the town hall. On the one side town business, on the other business via the town. Doing business is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning; it tugs on your pajamas and gets you up and on your feet.

  I had always watched Renato Natale from afar, as you do those people who unwillingly become symbols of some idea of commitment, resistance, and courage. Symbols that are almost metaphysical, unreal, archetypal. I felt a teenager’s embarrassment observing his efforts to set up clinics for immigrants and speak out against the Casalese Camorra families’ power and their cement and waste-management operations during the dark years of the feuds. They had approached him, threatened his life, told him that if he didn’t stop, his family would be made to pay for his choices, but he carried on speaking out in every way he could, even putting up posters around town that revealed what the clans had decided and done. The more persistent and courageous he was, the more his metaphysical protection grew. One would have to know the political history of this region to understand the real weight of terms such as commitment and will.

  Since the law regarding Mafia infiltration went into effect, sixteen town councils in the province of Caserta have been dissolved, five of them twice: Carinola, Casal di Principe, Casapesenna, Castelvolturno, Cesa, Frignano, Grazzanise, Lusciano, Mondragone, Pignataro Maggiore, Recale, San Cipriano, Santa Maria la Fossa, San Tammaro, Teverola, Villa di Briano. When candidates opposing the clans manage to win in these towns, overcoming the vote-trading and economic strategies that constrain every political alliance, they have to reckon with the limits of the local administrations, extremely tight funds, and total marginality. They have to demolish, brick by brick, to face off multinational companies with small-town budgets, and rein in enormous firing squads with local troops. Such as in 1988 when the Casapesenna town councilor Antonio Cangiano opposed clan infiltration of certain contracts. They threatened him, tailed him, and shot him in the back, right in the piazza, right in front of everyone. If he wasn’t going to let the Casalesi clan get ahead, then the Casalesi wouldn’t let him even walk. They confined Cangiano to a wheelchair. The alleged perpetrators were acquitted in 2006.

  Casal di Principe is not a town under Mafia attack in Sicily, where opposing the criminal business class is difficult, but where your actions are flanked by a parade of video cameras, famous and soon-to-be-famous journalists, and swarms of national anti-Mafia officials who somehow manage to amplify their role. Here everything you do remains within narrow perimeters and is shared with only a few. I believe that it is precisely within this solitude that what could be called courage is forged: a sort of armor that you don’t think about, that you wear without noticing. You carry on, do what you have to do—the rest is worthless. Because the threat isn’t always a bullet between the eyes or a ton of buffalo shit dumped on your front doorstep.

  They take you slowly, one layer at a time, till you find yourself naked and alone and you start believing you’re fighting something that does not exist, a hallucination of your brain. You start believing the slander that marks you as a malcontent who takes it out on successful people, whom you label Camorristi out of frustration. They play with you the way they do with Pick Up sticks. They pick up all the sticks without ever making you move, so that in the end you’re all alone, and loneliness drags you by the hair. But you can’t allow yourself that feeling here; it’s a risk—if you lower your guard, you won’t be able to understand the mechanisms, symbols, choices. You risk not noticing anything anymore. So you have to draw on all your resources. You have to find something that fuels the stomach of your soul in order to carry on. Christ, Buddha, civil commitment, ethics, Marxism, pride, anarchy, the fight against crime, cleanliness, persistent and everlasting rage, southernness. Something. Not a hook to hang on. More like a root, something underground and unassailable. In the useless battle in which you’re sure to play the role of the loser, there is something you have to preserve and know. You have to be certain it will grow stronger while your wasted energy tastes of folly and obsession. I have learned to recognize that root in the eyes of those who have decided to stare certain powers in the face.

  Giuseppe Quadrano and his men, who were allied with Sandokan’s enemies, were immediately suspected of Don Peppino’s murder. There were also two witnesses: a photographer who was there to wish Don Peppino well, and the church sexton. As soon as word got out that police suspicions were directed toward Quadrano, the boss Nunzio De Falco, known as ‘o lupo or the Wolf, called the Caserta police and asked for a meeting to clarify some questions concerning one of his affiliates. As a result of territorial divisions of power among the Casalesi, De Falco was in Granada, Spain. Two Caserta officers went to meet him there. The boss’s wife picked them up at the airport and drove into the beautiful Andalusian countryside. Nunzio De Falco was waiting for them not in his villa in Santa Fe, but in a restaurant where most of the customers were probably insiders ready to react if the police did anything rash. The boss immediately explained that he had called them to offer his version of the story, a sort of interpretation of a historical event rather than a denunciation or accusation. A clear and necessary preamble so as not to besmirch the family’s name and authority. He could not start collaborating with the police. Without beating around the bush the boss declared that it had been the Schiavone family—his rivals—who had killed Don Peppino. They had done it to make suspicion fall on the De Falcos. The Wolf
said that he would never have given the order to kill Don Peppino Diana because his own brother Mario was close to him. The priest had even tried to free Mario from the Camorra system and had succeeded in keeping him from becoming a clan manager. It was one of Don Peppino’s major accomplishments, but De Falco used it as an alibi. Two other affiliates, Mario Santoro and Francesco Piacenti, backed up the boss’s theory.

  Giuseppe Quadrano was in Spain as well. He was first a guest in the De Falco villa, then settled in a village near Valencia. He wanted to form a group and tried drug shipments as a way to quickly establish yet another Italian criminal business clan in the south of Spain. But he was unsuccessful. At heart Quadrano had always been a supporting actor. He turned himself in to the Spanish police and declared he was ready to collaborate. He contradicted Nunzio De Falco’s version and situated the homicide within the feud that was unfolding between his group and the Schiavones. Quadrano was the Carinaro neighborhood capo, and Sandokan’s Casalese men recently had killed four of his affiliates—two uncles and his sister’s husband. Quadrano said that he and Mario Santoro had decided to kill Aldo Schiavone, Sandokan’s cousin, to avenge the insult. Before taking action they called De Falco in Spain—no hit can take place without the boss’s consent—but De Falco blocked everything: if his cousin was killed, Schiavone would order that all of De Falco’s Campania relatives be killed. The boss announced that he would send Francesco Piacenti to implement his command. Piacenti did the drive from Granada to Casal di Principe in his Mercedes, the car that became a symbol of this area in the 1980s and 1990s. The journalist Enzo Biagi was shocked when he obtained the statistics of Mercedes sales in Italy for an article he wrote in the 1990s. Casal di Principe was among the top in Europe. But he also noticed another record: Casal di Principe was the urban area with the highest murder rate in Europe. The relation of Mercedes to murders would remain a constant of observation in Camorra territories. Piacenti—according to Quadrano’s first revelation—communicated that it was necessary to kill Don Peppino. No one knew why, but they were all sure that “the Wolf knew what he was doing.” According to Quadrano, Piacenti declared that he would do the killing himself on the condition that Santoro or some other clan member went with him. But Mario Santoro hesitated. He called De Falco to say that he was against the killing, but in the end he gave in. He couldn’t ignore such an important order if he didn’t want to lose the position the Wolf had assigned him as middleman in narcotrafficking with Spain. But he couldn’t accept the murder of a priest, especially without a clear motive, as if it were just like any other task. In the Camorra system murder is necessary; it’s like depositing money in the bank, purchasing a franchise, or breaking off a friendship. It’s no different from the rest of your life, part of the daily routine of every Camorra family, boss, and affiliate. But killing a priest, one outside the dynamic of power, pricks your conscience. According to Quadrano, Francesco Piacenti withdrew, claiming that too many people in Casale knew him for him to take part in the murder. But Mario Santoro accepted, accompanied by an affiliate of the Ranucci clan from Sant’ Antimo named Giuseppe Della Medaglia, with whom he had already executed other operations. According to the pentito, they organized for the next morning at six. But that night the whole commando was tormented. They were restless, couldn’t sleep, and quarreled with their wives. That priest scared them more than the rival clans’ guns.